Hi
I have a client who is wanting to enter certain information, e.g.
names, addresses, amounts etc. only once, but have about 6 documents
updated with the same information with a "click of a button".

Can someone suggest the best way to do this in MS Word XP/2003. Am I
better entering the data into an Excel spreadsheets (data source) and
having corresponding fields in the Word documents containing fields,
opening up each document separately and then merging them with the data
source? Or should I be doing something in Visual Basic - which, I am
not terribly familiar with. Maybe "Ask" fields?

Any suggestions anyone?

Cheers
Misso

If you would prefer to avoid VBA then I don't think you will get close to a
"one-click" solution, and whatever you do it is likely to cause a certain
amount of confusion for the users. Two possibilities depending on what the
users are capable of and willing to cope with:
a. Create an Excel data source as you suggest and use it as a mail merge
data source. However, there is no need to introduce an extra program - you
can create a Word document containing a two-row table. The first row
contains column (field)names. The user types the data into the second row.
Use that document as the data source for a merge. The user should be able to
open each document, preview the document, and either print, merge to a new
document, save etc. If they need to save reliable copies of the things they
are printing/producing, they must either merge to a new document or unlink
all the field codes by selecting those parts of the document that contain
fields and using ctrl-shift-F9. An advantage of this approach is that
/some/ formatting can get through to the including documents if that is
desirable, by using { REF } fields in the mail merge main document instead
of { MERGEFIELD } fields
b. create a Word document with one SET field for each field, e.g.

{ SET mytextfielda ""
}{ SET mynumericfieldb
}

(NB, all the {} are the special field code braces that you can insert using
ctrl-F9)

Select the entire document apart from the last paragraph mark and use
Insert|Bookmark to create a bookmark called mydocbody.

The user maintaining the data would need to
a. open the document
b. display the fields (Alt-F9)
c. overtype existing values with new ones
d. select the document (ctrl-A)
e. Re-execute the fields (F9)
f. close the document (optionally at this point)

In the including documents, use Insert|File to insert the file as a link,
specifiying the bookmark as the range. You should end up with an INCLUDETEXT
field such as

{ INCLUDETEXT "C:\\myicludedfile\\mydata.doc"" mydocbody }

Use { REF } fields to reference the included { SET } fields.

The user maintaining the 6 including documents would need to open each
document, select any areas of the document that contain references to the
SET fields (ctrl-A if it's just the document body, but more effort required
if there are fields in headers/footers etc.), and press F9.

You may need to uncheck Word Tools|Options|General|Web options|Files|Update
links on save to stop the INCLUDETEXT from going wrong.

Personally I suspect (a) would be the easier of those two in the end.

Peter Jamieson

"misso" wrote in message
oups.com...
Hi
I have a client who is wanting to enter certain information, e.g.
names, addresses, amounts etc. only once, but have about 6 documents
updated with the same information with a "click of a button".

Can someone suggest the best way to do this in MS Word XP/2003. Am I
better entering the data into an Excel spreadsheets (data source) and
having corresponding fields in the Word documents containing fields,
opening up each document separately and then merging them with the data
source? Or should I be doing something in Visual Basic - which, I am
not terribly familiar with. Maybe "Ask" fields?

Any suggestions anyone?

Cheers
Misso